Envy and Brothers Karamazov

Certain patterns of narrative logic in Envy can be found in Brothers Karamazov. Comparisons are not exact, of course, and not only because Olesha and Dostoevsky have markedly different visions. Whereas the three brothers in Brothers Karamazov have Alyosha as moral compass, the two brothers in Envy are two sides of a disagreeable coin--the apparatchik Andrei and the dissolute and programmatically disillusioned would-be counterrevolutionary Ivan. If the pseudointellectual Ivan of Envy resonates with the more capable Ivan of Brothers and if Andrei's live-by-the-guts character resonates with sensual Dmitri, by no means does Envy's unregenerate but feckless bourgeois Kavalerov resemble Dostoevsky's gentle Alyosha. Kavalerov envies Andrei, who has prospered in Soviet Russia, and like Ivan Babichev he envies Andrei's casual ease with Valia, whom he idealizes and resents at the same time. Kavalerov is as dissolute as Ivan Babichev, lacking (1) social coping skills implicitly mandated under the Soviet system and (2) the courage, energy, inclination, or talent for either noble self-sacrifice or counterrevolutionary subversion. Only in the throes of bottom-hitting drunkenness does he rouse himself from solipsism--ironically enough, in thrall of Ivan's Ophelia, which is as much pink elephant as actual machine.

But both Envy and Karamazov have noteworthy similarities. Brothers gives a picture of a society so decayed in substance that it is poised for fundamental change and a process of

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Category: Literature - E